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Dunce Cap Quarterly
T-Bird brings us some old Keith Murray inanity today. Skip to around minute four if you, like us, find the We Are Scientists guys mildly yet consistently annoying.
A long-overdue RIP to former Gabonese president-for-life El Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba, who died of what may or may not have been advanced intestinal cancer in Barcelona on June 8th. In a sequence of events that should register as eerily familiar to Eazy-E fans, Papa Bongo didn’t seek international (read: first-world) medical care until early May. It clearly didn’t take.
Under Bongo, who rose to power in 1967, Gabon proved anomalously tranquil amid the ever-convulsing border lines of West Africa. As Gabon’s neighbors in the continent’s armpit slaughtered each other, Bongo built one of the world’s most prolific kleptocracies, rooted in his country’s substantial oil reserves (at present, Gabon still has more miles of pipeline than of paved road). While no conclusive estimate of his total wealth exist, Papa hung his hat in an $800 million palace and owned properties in Nice, Malibu and the like. At 4’11”, Bongo may, indeed, have boasted one the highest dollars-to-inches ratio of any current or former head of state. He apparently spent freely: The New York Times reported that Bongo shelled out $9 million to Jack “Definitely Not in Gen Pop” Abramoff in 2003 for a promised meeting with Dubya; ten months later, Papa was sipping tea and noshing on crumpets in the Oval Office.
To the littlest Big Man there ever was, happy trails (and yes, ‘death’ buys you one free post that fails to note mentions only in passing a decades-long pattern of rampant corruption, ambivalence toward human trafficking, and disregard for human rights).
When they adapt the life story of Willie T. Coleman, Jr. for the silver screen, there shouldn’t be any discussion as to which African American A-lister will portray the guy:
I know, Wesley Snipes, right!? Right? He’d be perfect: “Always bet on black…when betting on landmark civil rights cases, that is. In games of chance, it’s pretty much 50-50, really.”
In reality, Coleman’s a hugely important guy — not long after becoming the first black Supreme Court clerk, he co-wrote the legal brief that brought down segregation in public schools nationwide and made for a wholesome and mildly entertaining moment in Forrest Gump.
But seriously, though, this guy looks just like James Earl Jones.
Puerto Rican flags and bandanas were flying off the shelves in Los Sures and Spanish Harlem and on D-Block over the last few weeks. On recent weekend days, you couldn’t round the block without catching Big Pun blaring from a passing SUV. The PR trinket hawkers crowded out the Halal cart guys and the Mexican mango stands, pushing them off the corners with sprawling setups dripping red, white and blue. Then, finally, Sunday came: The one day of the year when browns outnumbered whites on 5th Ave. With the JAPs and WASPs retreating to their Hamptons cottages, the Upper East Side belonged to the Boriqueños.
Def Jam’s street soldiers came out:
As did the hooptie crews:
And the merengue fellas, with the requisite porcine drummer man:
Then there was this guy; photos don’t do it justice, but as you’ll pick up, the owner’s clearly a fan of vintage Pacino:
Backside detail: so excessive, it just might be genius. Or a ludicrous waste of money — jury’s still out:
Chicken trike man rocked a picture of his chicken trike ON his chicken trike! A proud soul:
Jewish Hipster or Hip Jewster? Hewish Jipster? (Did we manage to offend TWO long-persecuted ethnic groups with the latter? Awesome.):
Puerto Ricans do MDMA, too:
Warning: NOT a real horse:
More on the way, cariños…
Con besos y abrazos fuertes,
DCQ
We were robbed. That we knew immediately. Musty clothes covered every inch of linoleum floor, from the cinderblock walls to the kicked-in back door. Two worn, ransacked backpacks lay somewhere underneath. The passports! Still in their place, alongside the credit cards and insurance cash under the plastic-sheathed mattress. Amid the tumult of the floor, an iPod stood out in its fluorescence, headphones disconnected earlier and stashed separately. They’d left this behind. They didn’t know what it was.
The cameras! The cameras. Gone. They got the motherfucking cameras. The ones with the photos of the beaches and the waterfalls and the jungles and the strutting street kids and the islands and the funeral pyre and the dirty fish markets and Waterloo and Maracas Bay and San Juan de las Galdonas. The cameras packed in our bags an hour before as we’d left our rented, windowless apartment to drink one last Carib with friends and close the book on Port-of-Spain and Carnival Tuesday. To bring closure to three days of round-the-clock costumed, painted, sweaty revelry and three weeks of haggling and tromping our way through Trinidad and northeastern Venezuela. Upon reaching Tragarete Road, we dove into a pulsing current of celebration, each participant a member of a “band” clothed in the stereotypical vision of cultures real and imagined — ”Egyptians” in full King Tut headgear, “jungle warriors” with leaves covering only the most forbidden of body parts, “Americans” channeling John Wayne.
The coordinated costumed pranced alongside flatbed semis alternately carrying full bars and stacks of speakers blasting the designated soca songs of the year (and there were about eight of those, played with according frequency). But this was day three — and we were out of Puncheon spitfire rum, with a plane to Tobago leaving in three hours. Our gang was easy to find — they were usually hanging in the steel-pan yard on the corner, shirtless and stinking from too many consecutive days of music and beer and just trying to “maintain” through the weeks of nonstop practice leading up to the festival proper. We said goodbye to Nigel and Kurt and Tommy and the kind dreadlocked guy Lennox whose canines were chiseled down to vampire fangs and walked back to the unkempt, ground-level unit to collect our packed bags en route to the airport. Only they were no longer packed.
Suspects abounded: Bryan, our drug-dealing landlord with stitches sealing a two-inch mystery gash above his Adam’s apple. Anthony, the skinny dark-skinned man who charmed us weeks earlier with his sordid story of growing up in The States for 35 years before being deported in the ‘80s for smoking a joint in San Fran’s Washington Square Park, who had led us to Bryan when we were in desperate need of shelter? The group of standoffish teenage boys loitering outside Bryan’s apartment when we left for the parade earlier? Nigel, the band leader and our entree to true Trini culture, our unofficial Tragarete Road tour guide? Could he have!? Someone who knew we wouldn’t have time to call the cops over for a report. Someone poor; that eliminated nobody. Someone who knew our schedule — someone who knew us. Someone we’d never find.
We just realized that in an uncanny convergence of wholly uncharacteristic immaturity, we’ve managed to use the words “Balls” and “Titties” in back-to-back post titles. Rather than keeping with the trend, we’ll “grow up” and make fun of the tagline of Crank 2 for ripping off Monthy Python:
This Statham guy was great as an unknown in Lock, Stock and has made nothing but abysmal casting choices ever since (see: The Transporter Pts. 1-6). People apparently watch his movies, though, which is sobering but by no means surprising. This tagline, however, leads one to suspect that perhaps he’s making a leap into self-deprecating irony (a la Ahnold in Last Action Hero), which wouldn’t make sense because while he’s certainly become typecast, he’s still not, you know, all that famous. Which is to say it’s too soon to mock the caricature he’d have to think he’s become.
All that aside, Amy Smart’s gaptooth is tailormade for skeet-skeet target practice fantasies, which is probably why she only gets roles in films 13-year-old boys pay to see.
There, a splooge reference. Happy now?
